Embodiments of the invention relate generally to medical diagnosis and, more particularly, to a system and method for analyzing and visualizing local clinical features.
One type of medical condition or disease that is of interest to the medical community is neurodegenerative disorders (NDDs), such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Alzheimer's disease currently afflicts tens of millions of people worldwide, and accounts for a majority of dementia cases in patients. Further, there is not, as of yet, any known cure. The economic and social costs associated with Alzheimer's disease are significant, and are increasing over time.
However, NDDs may be challenging to treat and/or study because they are both difficult to detect at an early stage, and hard to quantify in a standardized manner for comparison across different patient populations. In response to these difficulties, investigators have developed methods to determine statistical deviations from normal patient populations. One element of the detection of NDD is the development of age and tracer segregated normal databases. Comparison to these normals can only happen in a standardized domain, e.g., the Talairach domain or the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) domain. The MNI defines a standard brain by using a large series of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on normal controls. The Talairach domain references a brain that is dissected and photographed for the Talairach and Tournoux atlases. In both the Talairach domain and the MNI domain, data must be mapped to the respective standard domain using registration techniques. Current methods that use a variation of the above method include tracers NeuroQ®, Statistical Parametric matching (SPM), 3D-sterotactic surface projections (3D-SSP), and so forth.
Once a comparison has been made, an image representing a statistical deviation of the anatomy is displayed, allowing a viewer to make a diagnosis based on the image. Making such a diagnosis is a very specialized task and is typically performed by highly-trained medical image experts. However, even such experts can only make a subjective call as to the degree of severity of the disease. Due to this inherent subjectivity, the diagnoses tend to be inconsistent and non-standardized. It may, therefore, be desirable to increase the consistency and standardization of such diagnoses. It may also be desirable to incorporate additional data, including non-image data, to provide a holistic approach to patient diagnosis.